LYNCHBURG, Va. – Let’s address the elephant in the room — the inspiration behind the name city of Lynchburg isn’t what a lot of people assume.
In 1757, at just 17 years old, the city’s namesake, John Lynch, started a ferry service across the James River (then the Fluvanna River). His ferry service would go on to spur growth that eventually led to what we now know as the city of Lynchburg.
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Ted Delaney, the museum director and foundation secretary at the Lynchburg Museum, knows that there are a lot of assumptions about the city’s name, but despite the challenges, he said Lynchburg’s namesake isn’t anything to shy away from — it’s actually something to be proud of.
“We can be proud of what the real story is, who John Lynch was and his life. It’s really unfortunate for him and his legacy that the word ‘lynch’ has come to mean something else and it just immediately evokes something else in folks today.”
Those feelings Delaney mentioned came to a head last year when a petition to change the city’s name started to circulate that people are still signing.
On the flip side, a petition was also created to keep Lynchburg’s name.
When thinking back on the comments on both sides, Delaney said he remembers feeling discouraged — the out-of-towners painting his city with a broad brush, and the people blatantly ignoring the hurt the city’s name carries.
“In a way, dismissing that’s not any better. To totally dismiss that it’s such a triggering name, a triggering word, problematic — to totally dismiss that is not really the answer either,” Delaney said.
Delaney said that instead of dismissing people on either side of the argument, it’s best to use it as an opportunity to have a conversation about who Lynch was.
Aside from starting a ferry business that put the city on the map, Lynch was a devout Quaker, according to Delaney. Delaney explained that because Quakers did not believe in personal effigies of any kind, there are no known portraits or images of Lynch.
Back when Lynch was alive, Quakers were often persecuted and considered extreme — they also held views that we would consider liberal and progressive by today’s standard.
In fact, Quakers had come to believe in abolition and the ending of slavery as an institution by the 1770s.
As a devout man, Lynch emancipated all of his slaves by the 1780s. In the deeds for the emancipation of his slaves, Delaney said that Lynch stated something to the effect of the following, “Because I believe that freedom is the natural right of all mankind and I believe in individual liberty, I am hereby emancipating these people.”
Delaney said it’s difficult to tell how many slaves he owned, but at one point historians believe it was as many as 16, possibly more.
Beyond emancipating his slaves, Delaney said Lynch took it one step further and even wrote to Thomas Jefferson, encouraging him to meet with abolitionists about the prospect of resettling slaves back to Africa.
“Even though we know now that wasn’t the best solution, he was thinking about how he could make their lives better and how he could influence people who can actually make those decisions,” said Delaney.
Another important thing to note when looking at Lynch and his legacy: he died in 1820, around 60 years before lynchings began in the United States, according to the NAACP. And according to Delaney, no lynchings happened within city limits.
“People tried hard to make sure that didn’t happen when it looked like there were cases where there was a mob forming,” said Delaney.
Delaney said there was an NAACP report in the 1930s that said three lynchings happened in the city, but it’s tied back to an unfortunate typo — those incidents were in Lynchburg, Tennessee.
According to Delaney, there’s evidence that shows several instances where local leaders and ministers intervened to prevent possibly lynchings.
Delaney referenced one instance in 1920 when a Black man from Amherst County was accused of a violent crime and brought to the Lynchburg jail for his own safety. A mob reportedly started to form outside, but local officials and ministers convinced people to let the law run its course.
Another event that Delaney referenced is when the Ku Klux Klan held a march through the city in 1921. The next day, he said the Lynchburg City Council passed an ordinance that barred people from parading in public with their faces disguised or covered specifically as a way to keep the Klan away.
That spirit of keeping the peace lives on today, according to Delaney. After the riots in the city last June spurred by the death of George Floyd, Delaney recalls people from all walks of life coming together the next day at Monument Terrace for a prayer vigil.
“I saw a lot of that happen afterward, almost as a way to say ‘this is what we want protests to look like here,” Delaney said.
Delaney said when looking at how the community banded together after those events, it all adds up in his mind.
“I like to think that there is this clear line and thread from these really devout Quakers to people today,” said Delaney “That’s probably a little heavy-handed to draw that, but it is interesting to see that there does seem to be a culture here that that’s just how things turn out here. It does make you wonder if there’s something collective about us that does that.”
Looking forward, Delaney said he believes that the legacy of John Lynch can live on and inspire future generations to come.
“I know there’s a tendency now to dismiss all history or anything before the 60s as bad and dark, but I think there are a lot of moments there that can inspire us or to be optimistic about, especially when you see people like John Lynch and what he did in his lifetime,” said Delaney.